


The Flicked Switch

by DanaScullyMakesMeFeelAutopsyTurvy



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Episode: s06e08 The Rain King, F/M, Falling In Love, Masturbation, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-28
Updated: 2019-11-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:28:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21598423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DanaScullyMakesMeFeelAutopsyTurvy/pseuds/DanaScullyMakesMeFeelAutopsyTurvy
Summary: When did that flick switch for Scully? What was it like realising she couldn’t imagine her life with anyone other than Mulder?
Relationships: Fox Mulder & Dana Scully, Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 37
Kudos: 147





	The Flicked Switch

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Deutsch available: [Der umgelegte Schalter (The Flicked Switch)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24776077) by [DanaScullyMakesMeFeelAutopsyTurvy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DanaScullyMakesMeFeelAutopsyTurvy/pseuds/DanaScullyMakesMeFeelAutopsyTurvy), [trustmescully](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trustmescully/pseuds/trustmescully)



> Thanks to admiralty & Slippin’ Mickeys once again for their beta services ♥️♥️

A picture is worth a thousand words. 

That’s why they _had_ crime scene photographs, she thought. So that you could pore over them at a later date and ensure you’d noticed every last detail. So that you could prove your theory with irrefutable evidence. 

There could be no denying the particular beams of light that passed through an aperture and lens, turning silver halides into their pure, metallic form.

_Click._

A moment in time captured upside down as chemical reactions on film, developed in the negative and printed onto glossy, thick paper. The truth, captured indelibly for repeated reference. 

And there was no denying what she was staring at now. 

Dana Scully, made positive.

The exterior of a turn-of-the-century redbrick rowhouse in downtown Baltimore, where an anonymous tip had led the local PD to a body festering in the kitchen. On first examination the corpse appeared to have no bones, its limbs gelatinous and flailing, its scalp and features sagging without internal support. So she and Mulder had been called in for their expertise. 

Her autopsy had revealed that the chemical structure of the skeletal matter was indeed present throughout the body, as she had insisted to Mulder it would be, but in liquid form; a scientific explanation for which she was still working on.

But that wasn’t the issue here. The issue was the photograph. 

The FBI had sent them with a crime scene photographer in tow, who had documented the scene both inside and outside the house. Crumbed kitchen surfaces, peeling linoleum, unwashed breakfast dishes; all were detailed in the cluster of images stuffed into the file that had been sitting on the desk when Scully had arrived that morning. 

The image that had caught her eye was one of the crowd forming outside the house, lining up in patches around the police cordon. The shot had been taken from in front of the house, looking back towards those gathered there, on the off-chance the perpetrator had returned to the scene, hiding in plain sight, and could later be identified. 

A few bystanders stood about in straggled clumps, looking bored and cold, mildly less entertained than they would have been had they stayed indoors in front of their TVs.

And to one side, lifting up the crime scene tape, was Mulder in all his towering, brooding glory, looking up at the house with anxious curiosity.

Mulder, however, was not the concern. The concern was the shorter agent in a billowing trenchcoat slipping under the pointed archway created by his chivalrous gesture. Or more specifically, the way she was looking up at him with a dreamy expression on her face. 

Not looking: _gazing._

He was not paying her any attention whatsoever, but she was peering at him intently, shyly smiling, giddy with happiness. 

Unmistakably smitten. 

She blushed at the sight of herself, her arms going numb, blood freezing in her veins everywhere but her scalding cheeks. Lividity not of the prone dead but of the motile living: she was mortified. 

There was absolutely no way Mulder could be allowed to see this. As a trained psychologist. Hell, as a person with two mostly working eyes and more than half a brain. 

He’d need to be blind to more than red and green to miss this. She’d be exposed in a flash. 

She’d have to hide it. Destroy it.

Usually, she _lived_ for evidence. But this particular piece was highly incriminating; and she herself was the accused. She had no alibi, no defence; there she was in living color: _gazing_.

She didn’t even remember this glance, hidden from Mulder’s view by the tilt of his chin. Was this how she always looked at him when his back was turned? Surely not.

And yet...

  
  
  
  


She’d known for a while there was _something_ happening, she wouldn’t deny that, even to herself. 

She’d previously become sporadically aware of her feelings for Mulder the way you find a spot on your scalp, perhaps brushing your hair absentmindedly when a shock of pain notifies you to something that must have been growing unchecked for quite some time, entirely without your knowledge. 

Watching him kiss Phoebe Green in a ritzy Boston hotel. Bursting in on him pinned to a dingy motel bedspread by a leggy blonde detective. Learning he was running around investigating a case with some entomologist named Bambi, of all things.

Burning jealousy. Hot rage. Cold abandonment.

For years she’d dismissed the feelings the same way she would ignore such a minor imperfection: assuming they would go away on their own - be less messy, less painful, if left unexamined, untouched. 

  
  
  
  


She’d always known she was attracted to him, of course. That she had been from the second he’d first turned to greet her, dragging his attention away from the miniature proofs spread across a brightly glowing lightbox; subterranean, cocky, guarded...

Drop dead fucking gorgeous. 

She’d heard a lot about Fox ‘Spooky’ Mulder at the academy but, Jesus, no one had thought to mention _that._

It had taken barely a hot second for her to splice him into her late night fantasies, her fingers stealing beneath scratchy motel sheets and hastily packed pajamas to meet the need building between her thighs. But she had been conducting a solo masterclass in detachment for years now, the way she’d learned in anatomy class to regard the living as separate from the dead so that she could cooly slice into the sternums of donor cadavers with a steady hand; categorize internal organs; parse through guts without her own reacting adversely.

Yes, like the expert forensic pathologist that she was, she had been blithely compartmentalizing the Mulder with whom she spent seemingly every waking second and the Mulder who came to her in her imagination after dark, holding the two men worlds apart in her mind.

It was a taxonomy of her own devising: _Muldae diurnus et nocturnus._

There was the obsessive Mulder she worked with, off limits due to Bureau policies and to self-erected, self-protective barriers, and the Mulder she was obsessed with, making quick work of undressing in her mind's eye when alone.

The Mulder who was her best friend and the Mulder who was her best bet for quick release after a long day spent in close confines with the former. 

The Mulder who was downright impossible and the Mulder she found it impossible to resist.

The Mulder who gently palmed the small of her back, grounding her, and the Mulder whose imaginary palms ran roughshod over her bare skin as she ground her pelvis onto her own hands, sending herself flying.

The Mulder she tetchily discussed far fetched case files with, and the Mulder she breathily instructed to speed up, slow down, go harder, deeper, faster. 

The one she’d sat in innumerable cars with, and the one on whose lap she pictured herself seated frontwards, kneeling up and gripping the headboard with five white knuckles as her frantic cries echoed around her empty apartment. 

There was the Mulder her mother adored, and the one she herself devoured nightly - sometimes more - her Catholic guilt melting away by the time she arose from slumber early the next morning. 

The one who held open doors for her, and the one she’d once or twice idly pictured holding a swaddled infant, beaming down at her in a hospital bed, before she’d known that particular scene could never be in her real future. 

  
  
  
  


She had also become well practised at dissociating her two selves from one another.

There was Scully, who kept her cool and rarely smiled and whose feathers never ruffled; and there was Dana, whose skin flushed as red as her hair, her sweat running in rushed rivulets onto tangled, rucked up sheets. Dana, who sank her teeth into rented pillows, stifling involuntary moans for the sake of the unwitting cause of her forbidden utterances, mere inches away through paper thin walls. 

There was the agent with the poker face staring out of her Government issue ID, and there was the lovelorn woman in this image on the basement desk. Undeniable; caught unawares.

  
  
  
  


Now she knew the truth: _her_ truth. She had been visually assaulted at not even seven thirty a.m. with the realization that none of her careful categorization had been valid. 

None of it was real.

Her cancer and familial losses had already taught her there was very little difference between the living and the dead after all. Those rigid bodies on the slab had been pliant once, often recently. Had felt joy and pain, driven their cars distractedly, dropped their kids off at school assuming they’d be back for the afternoon carpool, looked forward to a drink after work. Had fallen in love. Argued with a parent. Made love with a spouse. Bought groceries. Lied to their boss. Read magazines on the john. Had been human; had been mundanely, presumptuously, gloriously alive. One day she too would cease to exist, her body returning to nothingness. 

And now the whole delicately balanced construction was crumbling. 

It had all been a lie. The biggest lie of her adult life. 

Looking at this image of herself, while sitting alone at Mulder’s desk on this otherwise unremarkable Tuesday morning, was the photographic equivalent of Bill Jr. sneering down at her and Charlie, pumpkin-pie-and-turkey-stuffed bellies pressed against the hearth rug, Bobby Darin and vinyl hiss on the record player, writing their letters addressed to the North Pole. Her eldest sibling, smug and condescending with his cruel revelation as hot tears of indignation ran down their cheeks at the betrayal: ‘ _Don’t you know, dummies? There is no Santa Claus. You’re writing to no-one. It’s been Mom all this time.’_

She saw now how she had betrayed herself.

_Don’t you know, dummy? There is no distinction. You’re head over heels for every aspect of this man._

_It’s been the same Mulder all this time._

_Click._

  
  


Mulder. Who was completely wrong for her. Who would never want what she wanted. Who was everything she knew she should avoid. Who was everything she couldn’t tear herself away from.

The smiling special agent in the crime scene photograph was one and the same with the desirous woman of her nighttime reveries.

She was Dana Scully, with a finite lifespan and an aversion to examining her own feelings, and she had a serious problem. And here it was now, loping through the door in a loosely fitted gray suit.

He barrelled in, all noise and greeting and same old, same old. He took up space and bustled about, and she remained still, in the eye of her own emotional storm. She remembered the photograph, and slid it beneath the file folder for now, laying her arm across it in what she hoped was a casual manner. She gave only the necessary answers, her voice as even as she could hold it.

She longed for a cigarette to steal, to steel and steady herself.

She was verging on a panic attack. 

  
  


Here Mulder was, carrying on as though everything were normal. There was no enormity of crashing realization weighing down his strong, swimmer’s shoulders. He was safe and secure in his blissful ignorance of her feelings, surrounded by endless hypothetical options for his future, should he ever choose to ponder it.

And here she was, heart pounding, cheeks flaring, averting her eyes when he smiled at her lest he somehow sense the ache between her legs that had spread, unbidden, way up to her heart; devastatingly, desperately unsafe - untethered - in the newfound knowledge that, for her, there could be no one else.

  
  


She turned to slide the purloined photograph into her briefcase, and did not see the longing in Mulder’s own gaze as he watched her tuck her hair behind one ear, as he had done a thousand times before, and would do a thousand times hence.

**Author's Note:**

> If you tell me what you like it will encourage me to write more of it...
> 
> Comment below, tweet me @CallMeScully or email me on danascullymakesme@gmail.com


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